Hi, Tucker Carlson Here for Masculinity

I always laugh when Tucker Carlson takes a stand for traditional, macho notions of masculinity because, obviously, he could hardly be further from them himself. In what was a truly weird segment on the Fox News weekend morning show, he said that smoking is a “symbol of freedom and masculinity,” while one of his co-hosts told female cartoon characters, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

Last week, leaked photos from the studios of animator Genndy Tartakovsky showed what the updated CGI-animated Popeye would look like.

“Of course, they’re wussifying,” co-host Tucker Carlson agreed. “Nothing is scarier to a modern liberal than tobacco. If Popeye were driving around giving the morning after [birth control] pill to fourth graders, that would be totally fine.”

“But smoking a pipe, a symbol of freedom and masculinity in America itself, the reason this country exists, tobacco, that’s like, ‘Oh, that’s outrageous. That’s a major sin.’”

The reason this country exists? Seriously, Tucker. It’s time to shut the hole that makes the words. Oh, and apparently trying to draw female superheroes as less sexualized is just like Sharia law.

Morris was angry that Wonder Woman was wearing a “pantsuit” instead of “short-shorts.”

“Some people would say that this is an important thing that we’re not sexualizing these women so much,” Kooiman noted. “It’s the same for men. I mean, we make sure they have perfect figures, actually larger-than-life better.”

“That’s a good Islamic point,” Carlson snarked. “We should cover them. We should cover the women because, otherwise, it just incites the men. It’s immodest as we say in the Sharia.”

“I want to see Wonder Woman in the original short-shorts, and the halter top,” Morris whined.

I once saw Tucker Carlson get out of his car – a Jeep Wrangler of course – in downtown DC. Let’s just say I think there’s a LOT he’s compensating for with these bits. I call it Little Man Syndrome (if he’s 5’8″, I’m the Pope).

Jeremy Shaffer

Uh, dumbass…it’s a cartoon character. It doesn’t actually have a body.

True but in the mindset of someone like Carlson and Morris, where the belief that a woman’s body is the beginning and end of her value is prominent and is supported by photoshopped models on magazine covers, I suspect that it gets really hard to distinguish between real bodies and animated ones.

http://zenoferox.blogspot.com/ Zeno

Does Carlson smoke? Since he’s so masculine, I presume he must. If he doesn’t, he must be a hypocrite of the highest order. (I may just have answered my own question.)

eric

Morris was angry that Wonder Woman was wearing a “pantsuit” instead of “short-shorts.”

Huh? At the risk of dating myself, IIRC Linda Carter’s standard ‘disguise’ on her show was a pantsuit. I’d bet that she spent well over 50% of her on-screen time on the show wearing them.

alanb

And here I thought that the fight to stop promoting smoking to kids or promoting it in general was settled decades ago with a vast portion of society approving it. Now I find it’s only those mean old Obama liberals that are trying to grab the cigarettes out of your hands.

eric

the reason this country exists, tobacco

Well, that and slaves. Tobacco was such a profitable cash crop in part because the american tobacco farmers didn’t have to pay their workers.

If Popeye were driving around giving the morning after [birth control] pill to fourth graders, that would be totally fine.

I would totally give morning-after pills to a pregnant 4th grader.*

*Unless they have different effects on young/small people. I’m no pharmacologist, after all.

eric

I would totally give morning-after pills to a pregnant 4th grader.*

*Unless they have different effects on young/small people. I’m no pharmacologist, after all.

Perhaps Carlson used that example because he was 16 before he passed fourth grade? Either that or it was some sort of racist slam/slam on the poor, where he assumes ‘those people’ don’t pass the fourth grade until well after puberty.

D. C. Sessions

Looks like it’s time for someone to pose TC in one of those anatomically-impossible superheroine poses that show both breasts and butt at the same time.

Alverant

WW’s costume always bothered me a bit. She’s from a foreign country but her costume is basically the US flag made up to look like a one-piece bathing suit. You look at her origins (her real world origins, not comic book origins) and you’ll find it’s a mess of contradictions. It’s like Playboy, it may have been ahead of their times back then but times have moved on while they stayed still until we passed them. I hate to say it, but she’s a bit of a relic who needs to be updated to reflect modern times.

dingojack

“…while one of his co-hosts told female cartoon characters…”

Are we sure they were not speaking about the barbie doll stuck between the two weedy wieners in the video still?

Dingo

http://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/User:Modusoperandi Modusoperandi

Plus, to gain his strength, Popeye eats a can of kale instead of manly spinach! And his boat is a Prius! And him and Bluto are gay married!

And Wonder Woman is a lesbian dominatrix!

And that last one is pretty close to true!

Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy

The implications of the comment about tobacco being the thing that made this country are really pretty gross because it distills to saying slavery made this country. Which is more or less true but most people have the decency not to be so proud of it.

http://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/User:Modusoperandi Modusoperandi

Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy, to be fair, it wasn’t built on tobacco and slavery. It was also built on cotton and slavery.

I hope that helps.

http://www.facebook.com/den.wilson d.c.wilson

Tucker Carlson is and always will be, the Grover Dill of punditry.

Ellie

The original Wonder Woman, Mr. Carlson, wore a split skirt and a strapless top – never a halter top (although I realize some people categorize strapless as “halter”), and she still wouldn’t have had sex with you.

Loqi

@Modus #12

Well, she does have rope with her at all times. Though I suspect the Lasso of Truth makes for a rather unsatisfying BDSM roleplaying experience.

“Tell me you belong to me!”

“I can’t do that.”

*WW strikes the sub with flogger*

“Say it!”

“No, I literally can’t with your damned magic rope. Can we please use some regular rope or bondage tape next time?”

cjcolucci

Two things that have bothered me for years:

Whose kid is Swee’Pea?

We know how Superman shaves; how does Wonder Woman wax? (Maybe the long pants are a way to avoid that question?)

addiepray

You know who also didn’t smoke? HITLER

And you know who did smoke? Obama. So Obama is super masculine and… Wait. Now I am confused. Which is just a ploy to distract from Benghazi!

I hate Wonder Woman’s traditional costume almost as much as I hate Tucker Carlson.

I am curious about the pipe, though. In the cartoons Popeye rarely smoked. Rather the pipe was used as an emergency spinach delivery system when Popeye was incapacitated. He’d best be careful not to get his arms pinned or knocked unconscious, or he’s going to be screwed without that pipe.

http://timgueguen.blogspot.com timgueguen

These guys need to pay more attention. There hasn’t been a lead character smoking in a kid’s cartoon in decades. This isn’t some horrible change because a supposed liberal is in the White House.

colnago80

Re addiepray @ #20

Schicklgruber was also, allegedly, a vegetarian.

suttkus

@11: Alverant says

WW’s costume always bothered me a bit. She’s from a foreign country but her costume is basically the US flag made up to look like a one-piece bathing suit. You look at her origins (her real world origins, not comic book origins) and you’ll find it’s a mess of contradictions. It’s like Playboy, it may have been ahead of their times back then but times have moved on while they stayed still until we passed them. I hate to say it, but she’s a bit of a relic who needs to be updated to reflect modern times.

She gets updated, but like all things in comic books, the next author comes along and unupdates it. She probably experiences that phenomena worse than most characters, actually. I won’t bother going into the long contradictory history of the justifications for the costume’s colors, or the embarrassing reaction when DC decided to give her actual clothes to fight in and the fans screamed in rage…

—

@18: Loqi says:

Well, she does have rope with her at all times. Though I suspect the Lasso of Truth makes for a rather unsatisfying BDSM roleplaying experience.

The lasso originally compelled obedience, not truth. It got toned down a bit during the fifties. A lot about Wonder Woman got toned down in the fifties.

—

@19: cjcolucci says:

Two things that have bothered me for years:

Whose kid is Swee’Pea?

Orphan, left on their doorstep.

We know how Superman shaves; how does Wonder Woman wax? (Maybe the long pants are a way to avoid that question?)

Old-school Superman didn’t shave, his hair just magically didn’t grow inconveniently. As a warrior from an ancient culture, I presume Wonder Woman doesn’t wax, and any appearance to the contrary is artistic license. However, she’s never been depicted as invulnerable (hence, needing the bracelets to deflect bullets), so it wouldn’t actually be a challenge for her to.

So glad my talents are useful in a thread for once! : – )

EnlightenmentLiberal

@eric

I’d be careful with that sex ed misinformation. The range that kids hit puberty is not just strictly 16+. No idea where you got that silly idea. IIRC, 9 year olds have gotten pregnant, although I agree it’s quite rare. Still 16+ is rather ridiculous and false.

On average, girls begin puberty at ages 10–11; boys at ages 11–12.[1][2] Girls usually complete puberty by ages 15–17,[2][3][4] while boys usually complete puberty by ages 16–17.[2][3][5] The major landmark of puberty for females is menarche, the onset of menstruation, which occurs on average between ages 12–13;[6][7][8][9] for males, it is the first ejaculation, which occurs on average at age 13.[10]

PS: Interesting in that this might be a legitimate case of rapid changes of human sexuality since the recent past, where even a hundred years ago it might have been 16+ for the onset of menstruation. Seems that it’s been rapidly changing.

dingojack

SLC (#24) – Who?!?

Dingo

magistramarla

Enlightenment Liberal,

That’s one of the things that have caused me to be upset at the recent culture in the US of trying to keep young people at home acting like children when they should be treated as young adults. Thanks to modern food and medicine, their bodies are maturing at younger ages, yet their parents are treating them like small children. It’s no wonder that our older teens are so confused.

I laugh at parents who want their 19 year old kids to stay at home to attend community or online college rather than encouraging them to go to a university or to at least get out of the house to experience life on their own. We encouraged our kids to leave home, preferably to go to an out-of-state school, since we felt that the college years were a good time to get practice in being a young adult.

I also saw this when I was teaching in a high school. I told my students that I considered teens to be young adults and that I would treat them as such. The department head, who used to be a pre-school teacher, treated her students like four year olds. When we both took our students to the computer lab, her class had to march in single file, line up at their computers, wait until she told them to clean and inspect their stations and then all sat down at once. They did the same in reverse at the end of the hour. My students met me in the lab, came in, cleaned their stations and got right to work at their own paces. They got up and left on their own when the bell rang.

Guess whose class left the lab in good order and whose class left candy wrappers and gum behind and which class more often broke computers or went to forbidden sites?

Kids live up or down to expectations, d upon how they are treated.

D. C. Sessions

Interesting in that this might be a legitimate case of rapid changes of human sexuality since the recent past, where even a hundred years ago it might have been 16+ for the onset of menstruation.

Puberty for girls goes back a long way — 2000+ years ago rabbis were comfortable with 12 as a typical age and thought it had been that way for a long time.

D. C. Sessions

Of course puberty for girls goes back a long way. “Puberty at about twelve for girls” is what I meant to write.

DaveL

If Popeye were driving around giving the morning after [birth control] pill to fourth graders, that would be totally fine.”

Fine? That would be hilarious. If you can’t make comedy gold out of Popeye trying to explain emergency contraception to 4th-graders, you may as well give up comedy altogether.

thascius

@26-The rapid change probably has more to do with better nutrition than anything else. I’m not sure 16 was ever a typical age for puberty.

@29-It wasn’t just the rabbis, in classical Greece and Rome girls typically were married about 12-13, they had to get it done quickly while they were still virgins. Men on the other hand generally didn’t marry until around 30 (noone cared if they were virgins or not when they got married).

magistramarla

The d stands for depending. Typing on a tablet is much more challenging than on a laptop!

http://teethofthebuzzsaw.blogspot.com Leo Buzalsky

@9

My thought was he’s going for this idea that liberals supposedly teach young children all about sex. Kind of similar to the idea that there is a “gay agenda” to teach homosexuality to children. Yet, they don’t seem to notice that their liberal conspiracy theories contradict each other, since they’d probably also blame liberals for not sexualizing these female characters so much.

magistramarla

thascius,

Also the Roman youths tended to get married after they had served in the army and had made a place for themselves in society. Daddy wasn’t too likely to sell off his daughter to someone who hadn’t done those things yet.

thascius

@35-As I recall men in the Roman army weren’t allowed to marry until they’d completed their term of service, which was 18 years, so if they joined around 12-13 that would make them about 30 when they finished.

magistramarla

Thascius,

You are correct for the rank-and-file types. They often had illicit families in the field who were camp followers. Many of the women in Britain who lived outside of the camps were being taken care of by the Roman soldiers. Those villages were the origin of many towns in Britain. The sons of noblemen would serve for a shorter time and then return to Rome to begin a political career. Of course, those who continued up the ladder of the course of honor would return to the battlefield as officers later.

Man, I hate autocorrect on this tablet! Anything that I type in Latin gets autocorrected, so I have to translate it into English.

eric

@26 – my quip was a slam on Carlson, not a serious tract on when puberty occurs. Sorry if you misunderstood, I thought that it was transparent and obvious, but next time I’ll make sure to include the “[/snark]” marker.

EnlightenmentLiberal

@D. C. Sessions

@thascius

I don’t know. I’m just going off what wikipedia has there and its references, which does state that the age of puberty has been rapidly lowering over the last century or so. I haven’t taken the time to confirm it. I wonder if it’s true and why. Maybe it’s the growth hormones used in the food. Maybe it’s just better nutrition. No idea.

dingojack

EL – Aww how cute, you unconditionally believe whatever wiki says.

On a unconnected note — I’ve got a nice bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in buying. (It’s cheap).

Dingo

EnlightenmentLiberal

The hell is your problem dingo? You could at least bother trying to read what I wrote.

Dingo’s reading comprehension:

you unconditionally believe whatever wiki says.

What I actually said:

I’m just going off what wikipedia has there and its references

… and its references

EnlightenmentLiberal

@dingo

Let me continue.

I assume you’re claiming I automatically believed the claim from wikipedia about how the age of puberty has been decreasing drastically over the last century or so. (If instead you’re taking issue with the first part about the modern age of puberty and implying that my only source there is wikipedia – what the fuck.)

Look what I wrote on this topic again, because apparently you didn’t the first time.

PS: Interesting in that this might be a legitimate case of rapid changes of human sexuality since the recent past, where even a hundred years ago it might have been 16+ for the onset of menstruation. Seems that it’s been rapidly changing.

I don’t know. I’m just going off what wikipedia has there and its references, which does state that the age of puberty has been rapidly lowering over the last century or so. I haven’t taken the time to confirm it. I wonder if it’s true and why. Maybe it’s the growth hormones used in the food. Maybe it’s just better nutrition. No idea.

At no point did I state it as undeniable fact. At no point did I even state a belief. I used so many weasel words and weasel phrases on this topic (changing age of puberty) in both posts for a reason. That’s because I haven’t done full due diligence to vet it as a fact. Instead, I examined wikipedia and examined its sources, and at first glance the sources looked legit (and still look legit upon a second quick glance). I feel that this lower amount of due diligence is sufficient to make the incredibly weasely statements which I up-thread made on this topic.

You are an asshole with a vendetta against me. This much is clear. Because of that vendetta, you are unable to clearly read what I have written. You also refuse to explain the reason for the vendetta, and thus I have no recourse – no way to make it better. In sum – go fuck yourself.